The subject application relates to image personalization systems and methods. While the systems and methods described herein relate to electronic image formation in computing systems and the like, it will be appreciated that the described techniques may find application in other image formation systems, other xerographic applications, and/or other imaging methods.
Image personalization has gained interest in recent years in print applications, and many different applications exist, among them XMPie's “ulmage,” and packages by Alphapictures, and DirectSmile. The packages have a different emphasis and strengths, but all deal with complex scenes. This includes curved surfaces such as car windshields, or varying text characteristics as if written into snow, sand, leaves or the like.
In all systems, a photorealistic result is intended, since the application area typically includes calendars, postcards and other types of artifacts that display images of natural scenes. With the existing solutions, the process of creating these personalized images is often cumbersome and complicated, requiring a high level of skill and experience on the part of the designer, or the use of preselected photos. Moreover, sophisticated rendering effects place considerable demands on computation and storage, and thus must be either carried out offline, or by dedicated high-end servers.
All three of the aforementioned packages produce high quality artifacts in their application domain, but none of them is applicable to real-time, digital front end (DFE)-based processing and printing and are thus normally not part of the print-generating Raster Image processor (RIP). This is also caused by the large data amount that has to be communicated to the machine (e.g., each image is unique and transmitted separately). Approaches exist to transmit image sections, but these have their own set of unique problems. Here and in the following the term “real-time” is used to indicate a processing speed comparable to the actual print speed of the output device.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need for systems and/or methods that create a variable data image in a simple fashion, and that does not require additional data transfer or upstream processing, while overcoming the aforementioned deficiencies.